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Removing jQuery from GitHub.com frontend

Here’s how and why the team at GitHub has slowly been deprecating jQuery from their codebase:

We have recently completed a milestone where we were able to drop jQuery as a dependency of the frontend code for GitHub.com. This marks the end of a gradual, years-long transition of increasingly decoupling from jQuery until we were able to completely remove the library. In this post, we will explain a bit of history of how we started depending on jQuery in the first place, how we realized when it was no longer needed, and point out that—instead of replacing it with another library or framework—we were able to achieve everything that we needed using standard browser APIs.

The team explores how using tools like eslint-plugin-jquery discourages developers at GitHub from using jQuery, but the team also notes that they decided to remove certain design behaviors altogether to help them achieve this goal:

As part of our refined approach to building frontend features on GitHub.com, we focused on getting away with regular HTML foundation as much as we could, and only adding JavaScript behaviors as progressive enhancement. As a result, even those web forms and other UI elements that were enhanced using JS would usually also work with JavaScript disabled in the browser. In some cases, we were able to delete certain legacy behaviors altogether instead of having to rewrite them in vanilla JS.

I think all of this is wonderful news. It’s good for jQuery, it’s good for developers, and it’s good for the web. But it also shows just how far browsers have come since the first release of jQuery back in 2006. What will browsers be capable of 12 years from now, I wonder.

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